Greed motive shines light on power outage
By G.
Dunkel
Millions of people in at least eight states and one Canadian
province have suffered through significant electric outages
this summer. A leader in the Electrical Workers union has
written that these outages are caused by the utility owners'
greed.
Press reports made it clear that outages hit over a million
people in Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco in August, and
in New York, northern New Jersey and Montreal in July. The
Midwest had scattered outages in late June and July.
The press reported that outages halted stock trading in
Chicago, caused traffic jams and flight delays in San
Francisco, shut down a steel plant in Louisiana, and spoiled
years of medical experiments in New York.
The potential for human tragedy is always present. A woman
in a wheelchair had to be evacuated from a skyscraper in
Chicago. A fire caused by an outage in Baltimore killed nine
people four years ago.
Many people--especially the elderly, the newborn at home and
asthmatics--depend on electricity. If it goes off and their
backups fail they are at severe risk.
My mother, who depended on an electric-powered oxygen
generator to breathe, woke up one night suffocating because the
power had failed. Frail, frightened and out of breath, she had
to find a flashlight, change her tubes to her emergency supply
and turn it on. She failed.
Three days later she died.
While summer use of air conditioners is often blamed for the
problems, Montreal and San Francisco use very little air
conditioning. In fact, a power outage in the East Bay area of
California was blamed on "drizzle." (San Francisco Chronicle,
Aug. 16).
In a letter published in the Aug. 16 St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, Thomas W. Fagan, business manager of Electrical
Workers Local 1439, wrote that "many are wondering why power
shortages, brownouts, blackouts and loss of power are becoming
more frequent. There is one simple reason for these
problems--greed.
"It is the uncertainty of deregulation that has caused
companies to make cutbacks in maintenance and work forces and
to stop investing in more generation in the past 10 years. The
desire to make more money has threatened reliability, access,
safety and once-secure jobs."
Fagan concluded: "Studies indicate that demand is increasing
while generating capacity remains stagnant. ... And as
witnessed on the deregulated wholesale market, where prices
have skyrocketed from $35 a megawatt to as high as $5,000, what
power is available goes to the highest bidder. Right now, those
astronomical prices cannot be passed on to consumers but that
could easily change."
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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